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‘Very pleased’: Trump’s guilty verdict ignites mixed reactions outside NYC courtroom

‘Very pleased’: Trump’s guilty verdict ignites mixed reactions outside NYC courtroom

Trump critics and supporters provided enthusiastic reactions outside the courtroom where former President Trump was convicted on all counts against him on Thursday, including some who shared their thoughts with Fox News Digital. “I’m really f—— pleased, f— that guy,” one man told Fox News Digital outside the courtroom with a smile on his face. One man who spoke to Fox News Digital expressed dismay that voters must choose between Trump and Biden. “The sad thing is we’re just in this situation again where there’s just two candidates, one who is very old, and one who is now a convicted felon,” the man said. “That’s just not a state of political affairs that I never want to find a country that I believe in so much.” ‘FREE FATHER THERESA’: TRUMP SUPPORTERS AND CRITICS SOUND OFF ON TRUMP’S GUILTY VERDICT One man standing in the crowd was displaying multiple signs. The first said, “the evidence to convict Trump is glaring.” The second sign said, “Let the reckoning begin.” “I’m very pleased that there’s finally some accountability for Donald Trump,” a woman told Fox News Digital.  TRUMP CAN RUN FOR PRESIDENT FROM JAIL, BUT HE’S NOT LIKELY TO GO THERE “It had to be an attempted coup for them to even consider going after him.” Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree on Thursday. Each count carries a maximum prison sentence of four years. In total, Trump faces a maximum sentence of 136 years.  Moments after the verdict was delivered by the jury, the former president spoke to reporters in the hallway outside the courtroom.  “This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt, as a rigged trial and disgrace. It wouldn’t give us a venue change,” Trump said. “We were at 5% or 6% in this district, in this area. This was a rigged, disgraceful trial.”  Trump said “the real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people.”  Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report

2024 Showdown: Trump and Biden quickly cash in on former president’s guilty verdicts

2024 Showdown: Trump and Biden quickly cash in on former president’s guilty verdicts

Former President Trump headlined a campaign fundraiser just a couple of hours after being found guilty of all 34 felony counts in his New York City criminal trial. With the verdict in and the trial over, Trump on Thursday evening quickly got back to focusing on his 2024 election rematch with President Biden. “We’ll be fighting hard,” Trump told Fox News’ Brooke Singman, adding he was excited to get back on the campaign trail.  “We are already back to the mission,” the Trump campaign told Fox News Digital. “President Trump won’t let this sham stop the movement of this campaign to save the nation.” TRUMP TRIAL VERDICT SENDS THE 2024 ELECTION REMATCH INTO UNCHARTED WATERS Minutes after the verdict was read in the first trial of a former or current president in the nation’s history, Trump’s team put out a fundraising appeal to supporters. “Friend: Is this the end of America?,” Trump argued in the email. “I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial. “My end-of-month fundraising deadline is just DAYS AWAY!” Trump emphasized in the email, which included a photo of the former president labeling him a “political prisoner.” WHAT TRUMP TOLD FOX NEWS DIGITAL FOLLOWING THE VERDICT WinRed, the GOP online fundraising platform used by Trump’s campaign, among others, briefly shut down within an hour of the verdict. Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita advised donors encountering a WinRed error message to sign up for Trump’s text messaging list or log back onto the site and try again.  “If you are one of the millions of American Patriots wanting to donate to Donald Trump’s campaign and you get an error message from @WINRED …don’t give up! Log back on and try again ! or Text TRUMP to 88022,” LaCivita wrote in a tweet. BIDEN CAMPAIGN QUICKLY POUNCES ON TRUMP TRIAL GUILTY VERDICTS Trump’s campaign website also directed donors to Anedot, another fundraising platform used by various GOP campaigns. Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes told Fox News “from just minutes after the verdict, the digital fundraising system has been hit with record numbers of supporters. The traffic is so large that it is causing intermittent delays. The campaign is grateful for this massive outpouring of support because it shows that Americans have seen this sham trial as the political election interference that Biden and Democrats have always intended.” Biden’s re-election campaign also quickly sent out fundraising appeals following the verdict. “Despite a jury finding Donald Trump guilty today, there is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box,” the Biden campaign wrote in a fundraising text to supporters.  And it urged that “if you have been waiting for the perfect time to make your first donation to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, we’re here to tell you today is the day.” Trump has been aiming to close his fundraising gap with Biden. In April, his campaign and the Republican National Committee for the first time outraised the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee. While Trump has stepped up his fundraising, the Biden campaign still enjoyed an $84 million to $49 million cash-on-hand advantage at the end of April. Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

‘Salute me or shoot me’: Venezuelan gang members sneaking into US pose ‘serious threat’

‘Salute me or shoot me’: Venezuelan gang members sneaking into US pose ‘serious threat’

A slew of illegal immigrants belonging to a bloodthirsty Venezuelan street gang were caught at the southern border this week, according to the top Border Patrol official — just as lawmakers sound the alarm about the gang. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens announced that 10 migrants affiliated with Tren de Aragua were arrested across Texas. “Keep your eye on this gang,” the chief warned. “Their criminal activities represent a serious threat to our communities!” BORDER STATE LAWMAKER SOUNDS ALARM ON BLOODTHIRSTY VENEZUELAN GANG ENTERING US: ‘THEY HAVE NO RULES’  He attached pictures that showed tattoos from gang members, including one which said “Salute me or shoot me.” Customs and Border Protections (CBP) has previously distributed intelligence bulletins to agents revealing the tattoos and identifiers for the gang.  TdA is said to specialize in extortion, kidnapping, murder and sex trafficking. Federal authorities have been warning that the gang is trying to establish itself in the U.S., where police are already linking it to organized crime. The FBI has also warned that the gang could team up with the bloodthirsty MS-13. CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF THE BORDER SECURITY CRISIS The gang, known as TdA, hit the headlines earlier this year when it emerged that the brother of the suspect in the killing of Georgia student Laken Riley had affiliations with the gang.  Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital on Thursday that the gang “has unleashed violence across Central and South America.” “Now, we’re seeing more people coming across the border illegally with ties to Tren de Aragua. Until we get the border crisis under control, more and more bad actors will take advantage of the loopholes in our immigration system,” he said. “Our Border Patrol Agents are in overdrive working to protect our borders and keep criminals out, but the only way forward to truly solve this crisis is to crack down on the root cause of the issue – illegal immigration.” He previously told Fox in an interview that the gang is going to be the “dominant transnational criminal organization throughout the United States. There’s no doubt in my mind.” OPINION: VENEZUELAN GANGS ARE IMPORTING NEXT-LEVEL BRUTALITY, FEAR TO OUR STREETS Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., meanwhile, has called for the designation of TdA as a transnational criminal organization in order to allow sanctions on gang members and assets to be frozen. “Absent action, there is a very real chance that our cities will begin to resemble the Latin American communities in which Tren de Aragua rose to power: places where people do not go out at night, extortion is a part of everyday life, and fear of brutality, rather than respect for law and order, rules the streets,” he warned.

First on Fox: Calls for State Department to abandon ‘obsession’ with DEI and ‘depoliticize,’ new report says

First on Fox: Calls for State Department to abandon ‘obsession’ with DEI and ‘depoliticize,’ new report says

The State Department’s practices of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring has led to potential inefficiencies in hiring and concerns about the quality of employees in the foreign service, according to a report from The Heritage Foundation.  “Ideologically driven bureaucrats at the State Department are severely undermining U.S. diplomacy by artificially engineering equal outcomes in hiring and personnel decisions, through overriding objective criteria,” Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center and author of the report, told Fox News Digital.  “The world is on fire right now — as seen by the conflicts in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Yet, the State Department is wasting limited resources on an agenda that does not advance American interests and is not supported by data,” Hankinson, who also served as a foreign service officer, said. “My report lays out how the State Department can return to core American values and implement processes that prioritize merit-based principles. The American people deserve better.”  OBAMA STATE DEPT BLOCKED FBI FROM ARRESTING SUPPORTERS OF IRAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM IN US: EMAILS The report focuses on the hiring practices of the Foreign Service, which provides personnel to the U.S. diplomatic services and consists of over 13,000 professionals, insisting that the service must select its employees through “objective, meritocratic criteria and are accountable to the president.”  “We haven’t seen the report, but we welcome a diversity of viewpoints,” a State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel argued during a press conference Thursday that the department welcomes “diverse points of view and believes it makes us a stronger department, and it makes and leads to a stronger policymaking process.” “The secretary and department leadership will continue to seek out a wide range of views because we think it improves our policymaking process,” he said in response to reports a career State Department official had quit over disagreements with a recently published report claiming Israel was not impeding humanitarian aid in Gaza.  Hankinson lays out what he determines are a few myths about hiring and staffing in the State Department, namely that there’s a lack of racial and gender diversity, which the department resists; that “structural barriers” prevent minorities from entering the Foreign Service; that promotions are biased; that the department has a “hostile” work environment for minorities at State and they leave because of that hostile climate.  HAMAS’ GAZA HEALTH MINISTRY UNDER MICROSCOPE AS QUESTIONS CONTINUE OVER NUMBER OF DEATHS Another career official who quit over the Israel-Gaza internal disputes noted that while she found discussion on this topic unwelcome, it ran counter to the open discussion and welcome dissent on virtually every other topic over her 18 years with State, according to The Washington Post. The report argues that “by separating the department’s 25,000 employees into their various “intersectional” components, the DEIA baseline seems intended to serve efforts by the department to achieve “equity” through race and sex-based preferences.” (The “A” stands for accessibility.) According to the report, 35% of the current 26,000 civil service and foreign service employees are identified as “minority,” citing the State Department’s permanent workforce diversity data as of Sept. 30, 2023. Additionally, the report claims racial percentages within the workforce are “within 10% of the national levels.”  The report quotes former State Department Director of Recruitment Woody Staeben as arguing eight years ago that the number of White officers among new hires had dropped by 30%, but that “it will take much longer for the overall figure to change because the average Foreign Service career spans 27 years,” meaning that issues with the makeup of the workforce reflect a delayed reaction to the makeup from years prior.  STATE DEPARTMENT OFFERS CONDOLENCES FOR DEATH OF IRAN’S PRESIDENT IN ‘BAFFLING’ MOVE, HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER SAYS The report’s most striking point — that the department stresses employees are held accountable to the president — derives from perceived resistance within the State Department to former President Trump’s policies, such as efforts to control illegal immigration, leading the report to accuse the State Department of having an increasingly left-leaning bias and arguing the bias derives from universities.  “Although there are approximately 65 appointees at State, (not including ambassadors), they are often unable to change policy in line with the vision of the President, due to bureaucratic inertia, ignorance of how things are done, and resistance from entrenched career officials,” the report says. “This systemic paralysis is a fundamental challenge to the principle that elections should result in policy changes.”  The most significant issue the report finds is the lack of emphasis on the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT), which former Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley dismissed as having “zero correlation to being a successful diplomat” while more subjective oral exams helped test for “racists, or sexists, or homophobes or ableists,” which she determined as “things that we need to be screening for.”  “Those who have the vast majority of senior [foreign service] positions are primarily European American men. … You don’t get to 87% of one group that is not 87% of the population and feel confident that all of those selections were made on the basis of merit,” Abercrombie-Winstanley said during her 2023 testimony on diversity practices at the State Department.  STATE DEPARTMENT ISSUES ‘WORLDWIDE CAUTION’ ALERT FOR AMERICANS OVERSEAS The report stressed the value of standardized tests, such as the SAT for college, the MCAT for medical school and the LSAT for law school, as indicators for success throughout a career in the given field.  “It stands to reason that accepting applicants with lower FSOT scores will lead to lower performance as those officers move through their careers, both to their own and to the service’s detriment,” according to the report. “The State Department’s Board of Examiners reportedly did not conduct any empirical research to determine whether higher FSOT scores correlated with career performance before deciding to de-emphasize the test.” CLICK HERE TO FOR THE FOX NEWS APP Therefore, the report concluded that Congress should

Trump campaign warns Biden to ‘buckle up’ after he’s released from ‘freezing’ court to hit campaign trail

Trump campaign warns Biden to ‘buckle up’ after he’s released from ‘freezing’ court to hit campaign trail

Even with his guilty verdict, former President Trump is now free from a “freezing” New York City courtroom after a six-week trial and is ready to hit the campaign trail once again. His campaign is warning President Biden’s team to “buckle up.”  Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree in New York v. Trump.  Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the case, said Trump was required to be in court every day for the trial, except Wednesdays when court was not in session.  The former president railed against the judge and Democrats daily for confining him to the courtroom, repeatedly telling reporters and supporters it was “freezing” and like being stuck in a “freezing cold icebox.”  TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS IN NEW YORK CRIMINAL TRIAL “Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats confined President Trump to a courtroom for more than eight hours a day for more than six weeks, and he’s still winning,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. “Now that he is fully back on the campaign trial, Biden and the Democrats better buckle up.”  Leavitt told Fox News Digital Trump “generated billions of dollars in earned media coverage throughout the trial, hosted massive rallies and impromptu campaign stops in New York and beyond, increased his lead over crooked Joe Biden in the polls and raised more money than Biden and the Democrats in the month of April. Not even a witch hunt trial could slow him down. In fact, it only made him stronger.”  TRUMP HOLDS MASSIVE BEACHFRONT CAMPAIGN RALLY FOR RAUCOUS NEW JERSEY CROWD: ‘WE’RE GOING TO WIN’ The 2024 presumptive Republican nominee took advantage of the location of the trial — New York City — and highlighted that it has been in decline since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took office. First, Trump was greeted warmly by New Yorkers in upper Manhattan at a Harlem bodega and vowed to “straighten out New York.”  Trump was met by a large crowd chanting “Trump, Trump, Trump,” “Four more years,” and “We love Trump.” The crowd was singing the national anthem.  Trump blasted the trial and charges against him, saying it is “rigged,” “all politics,” and “coming out of the [Biden] White House.”  And that day was the day the former president decided the criminal trial could actually have a “reverse effect.”  “It makes me campaign locally, and that’s OK,” Trump said. “We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done, so I think it’s having a reverse effect. TRUMP DELIVERS PIZZA TO NEW YORK CITY FIREFIGHTERS IN CAMPAIGN STOP AFTER DAY IN COURT “We’re going to come in. No. 1, you have to stop crime, and we’re going to let the police do their job. They have to be given back their authority. They have to be able to do their job,” Trump said. “And we’re going to come into New York. We’re making a big play for New York, other cities, too. But this city, I love this city.”  Trump said New York has “gotten so bad in the last three years, four years.”  “And we’re going to straighten New York out. So running for president, we’re putting a big hit in New York — we could win New York,” Trump said.  A week or so later, Trump spent the day in court, but on his way home, he stopped to deliver pizzas to first responders at a midtown Manhattan fire department, the same New York City fire department he visited in 2021 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks of Sept. 11, 2021.  Trump posed for a photo with each firefighter individually and in a group and left pizzas. He didn’t speak to the press.  The former president crisscrossed the nation for rallies and campaign stops on Wednesdays and would return to New York City for court first thing Thursday morning.  TRUMP VOWS TO ‘SAVE’ DEEP-BLUE NEW YORK CITY IN MASSIVE, HISTORIC BRONX RALLY The only non-Wednesday Trump spent outside the courtroom was May 17, when he traveled home to Palm Beach, Fla., to attend and celebrate the high school graduation of his youngest son, Barron Trump.  Trump also held rallies in and around New York, which drew historic crowds in traditionally blue districts.  Trump held a rally in Wildwood, N.J., the largest political rally in the blue state of New Jersey, bringing between 80,000 and 100,000 people to support the presumptive Republican nominee.  TRUMP SAYS CRIMINAL TRIAL IS HAVING A ‘REVERSE EFFECT,’ AS HE CAMPAIGNS AT NEW YORK BODEGA, VOWS TO SAVE CITY “As you can see today, we’re expanding the electoral map because … we’re going to win the state of New Jersey,” Trump said during that rally. “I think we’re going to win them all. All across America, millions of people, so-called blue states, are joining our movement based on love, intelligence and a thing called common sense.”   And just weeks later, ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, Trump held a massive and historic rally in the Bronx.  Trump rallied a crowd of what his campaign estimated to be 25,000 at Crotona Park in The Bronx, far more than the 3,500 attendees they were initially expecting.  “I’m here tonight to declare we are going to turn New York City around, and we are going to turn it around very, very quickly,” Trump said after taking the stage. “We are going to make New York bigger, better and greater than ever before.” The presidential race against Biden won’t slow down in June, with Trump out of his trial and a debate between the two presumptive nominees set for an unprecedented early date of June 27.  Trump’s sentencing hearing for the New York City criminal conviction is scheduled for July 11, just days before the start of the 2024 Republican National Convention.